Jesus was a Palestinian?

My thoughts on the superimposing of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto the biblical story, the prioritizing of narrative over truth and the dangers of rewriting history.

Image from the Telegraph

Did you know that if Mary and Joseph were alive today, they would need to pass through seven Israeli checkpoints in order to arrive from Nazareth to Bethlehem?

Did you know that Mary was, in fact, named Maryam and was a poor, young, no doubt terrified Palestinian girl?

Did you know that Jesus was born a refugee in Palestine?

Did you know that Jesus was Palestinian?

As a student of history and of the Christian bible, I must profess that I did not know any of this.

I am a little embarrassed; however, I am prepared to admit that for all these years I have been living in ignorance.

Let me explain:

I understood that Jesus was born around 6BCE. This is partly based on the accepted date of King Herod the Great’s death, 4BCE. The bible relates that Herod sought to kill the newborn child, therefore establishing Jesus’ birth prior to Herod’s death.

At this time, the land and its people were under occupation. The occupying power was the Roman Empire, which had conquered the land known to its inhabitants as Judea in 63BCE.

Though the first recorded use of the term Palestine was by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th Century BCE, a reference to the Philistines, a long-since extinct people who had previously inhabited parts of the coastal plain, the vast majority of sources both before and after Herodotus’ writings referred to the region as Judea. Pertinently, these sources include those written by the local resident population.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, the land, known by the Romans as ‘the Province of Judea’, was a semi-autonomous vassalage of Rome; in fact, King Herod the Great, whilst holding Roman citizenship, was actually of Judean and Nabatean heritage. Rome would extend its control to a system of full occupation following the end of Herod’s son, Herod Archelaus, as Tetrarch in 6CE.

Following the Bar Kochva rebellion of the Jews against the Romans, which was launched in 132CE and put down in 135 or early 136CE. The Romans renamed the province, replacing Judea with the name Syria-Palaestina. One of the first documented uses of the descriptive term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to a resident of Palestine dates to the 10th century CE. The first documented use of the term, specifically applied to the Arabs of Palestine, was in the late 19th Century.

Based on the historical facts above, I arrived at what I now know were some terribly misplaced conclusions:

1. The region that Jesus was born in was called Judea (Yehuda) by the local indigenous population of which Jesus and his family were members.

2. The indigenous population, of which Jesus was a member, were Judeans. The name Judean derives from the Hebrew tribe of Judah, though long before the first century BC, the name had come to mean all those sharing a common historical, national and religious connection, the vast majority of whom dwelled within Judea. This included the descendants of other Hebrew tribes who had escaped to Judea at the time of the Assyrian Conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel in 721BCE.

3. Like Jesus, the indigenous Judeans in Judea spoke Aramaic and Hebrew. In Hebrew, the word for a Judean is ‘Yehudi’.

4. ‘Yehudi’ is the origin of the word Jew. In Hebrew, the word for ‘Jew’ is ‘Yehudi’ which literally translates as ‘of Judea’.

5. Jesus and his family were ‘Yehudim’ - Jews from Judea. Judea and Judean were not only geographic terms but also ethno-national-religious ones.

6. Jesus and his fellow Judeans (Jews) did not refer to themselves as Palestinians nor did they call the land Palestine. It is likely that most Judeans did not know the term, and those who did likely would have viewed it negatively, as it related to a long-since disappeared biblical-era enemy of the Jews.

7. As a Jew born in Judea, Jesus was not born a refugee. The biblical account of the family’s departure from Nazareth to Bethlehem was not related to refugee status but rather to the need to register for the Roman census of that year in the family's home city. The bible asserts that Jesus was descended from King David, himself born in Bethlehem, both matrilineally and patrilineally.

8. It may be argued that Jesus and his family became refugees for a brief time, during his early childhood. The Bible relates that Jesus’ family descended to Egypt from Judea in order to avoid being killed by King Herod, who sought to kill what the bible describes as ‘the King of the Jews’.

9. 
   

I had arrived at well-founded conclusions based on historical research, respect and knowledge of Christian and Jewish texts and theology, and a deep understanding of the evolution of Jewish identity.

But this was my mistake.

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